


these marks on my arms, they’re yours.

by SavageNutella46



Series: Maribat One-Shots [8]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, BadBitch!Jason, F/M, Receptionist!Marinette, TiredCEO!Tim, five seconds?, is it really death if he’s only dead for like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:15:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27316876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SavageNutella46/pseuds/SavageNutella46
Summary: Soulmate AU where the number of tally marks on a person's skin shows how many times their soulmate has died, along with the first initial of their name on the side of their soulmate's wrist.Marinette’s always had a little more than the acceptable number of tally marks on her arms.
Relationships: Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug/Jason Todd
Series: Maribat One-Shots [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1882840
Comments: 40
Kudos: 428





	these marks on my arms, they’re yours.

**Author's Note:**

> (You can bring your soulmate back to life as many times as you want in this world, babe.)

Ever since Marinette could remember, she's always had a couple more than an acceptable number of tallies on her arm.

Her soulmate must really like getting into trouble, but it physically hurts every time she has to bring them back to life. The constant ache in her chest and her wrist burns brighter each time, getting more intense and painful.

She's never really understood death until she had to bear the weight of taking down a terrorist at the age of thirteen with no more than a push and a shove into a mans cruel world.

By the time she's eighteen and defeated Hawkmoth, she's died more than one thousand times. And shes remembered every single one of those deaths. The worst part about it, she's had to think about what her soulmate thought about her, bringing her back to life over again, a seemingly vicious, endless cycle.

Yet, there her soulmate stood, with their own open-ended number of tallies sitting on her own arm, crawling it's way up her body with each passing day.

She wonders how her tallies would look on her soulmate's arm, maybe a pink or red M stamped on their own wrist. Or maybe they covered it up with a sleeve or wristband and didn't want people to see it.

She supposed it was why they were soulmates. They had both been in danger numerous times and she was assuming, had a stringent knowledge of imperilment. Maybe they could grow together as soulmates with experience in the pain department, too.

Still, she lay in bed one night in the new but old Gotham apartment atop her bakery, staring at the tallies.

It hurt to bring her soulmate back to life every time they die. To flip the hypothetical switch and practically feel their life and spirit returning to their own body.

It hurts her to know they might've not wanted it. They had died too many times to be deemed normal, at least in Paris. She wonders if they were doing this on purpose, dying over and over again.

Or maybe they aren't even in her nearby radar.

Maybe Paris is the problem. She doesn't fit in here. Every single human living in the city of love had at least twenty or thirty tally marks on each of their wrists, courtesy of Hawkmoth, but none of them had even a slither of what Marinette is marked with on her arms.

She moves.

She moves her whole life over to Gotham, where everyone has died at least a multitude of times. Either from petty crimes or rogues, everyone has died. A lot.

She walks the streets with a familiar tension that had been setting in since she was thirteen until she finds her job as receptionist at Wayne Enterprises.

She doesn't know why they even thought of hiring her, but she was grateful to living on something more than minimum wage and a bunch of freelance jobs for freaky people.

She stops typing at the round desk for a moment and looks up, catching the eyes man idly standing in front of her desk.

"Can I help you." The not-question rolls smoothly off her tongue with traces of a slightly bored tone painting her voice.

He blinks, and opens his mouth to speak, obviously not deterred by her tone and mood from the way a font of humor shines in his aquamarine iris.

"Jason Todd. Just here to see my brother, little Timmy." The corners of her mouth perk up a little at the mention of Tim Wayne, an image popping up in her head of the co-CEO running past the desk with purple bags under his eyes and a fast, sleep-slurred greeting at her while she's typing away at her keyboard in the mornings.

She's heard of Jason Todd, usually with the hyphenated Wayne at the end of her co-worker's hushed whispers to her at lunch time. It seems the man isn't actually how she thought he'd look.

He's kind of hot. Sporting a brown leather jacket and wind-ruffled hair with a mysterious white streak hiding in between the sea of velvet black, he has a scent to him, one that wafts over to her with a note ofmotorcycle engine and gunpowder. Overall, his looks scream bad boy and, 'scram, punk.'

When her arm reaches up to his, her white blouse sleeve rolls up slightly, revealing the red J on the side of her wrist. She stingily hands the all-access lanyard to him, slamming it into his palm, which is warm, she notes, when the tips of her fingers accidentally brush up against his hand.

He winks, "Thanks," He pauses and reads her name off of the ID card before languidly uttering it to her, "Marinette." and walks around the desk to the elevator.

She decides she doesn't like him as soon as he rounds the corner to where the group of pristine steel elevators stand.

Marinette hopes he hadn't see her violent blush at the mention of her name rolling smoothly off his tongue.

*

It's the fucking streak in his hair. Making him all cocky and shit. He looks at her with an amused twinkle in his stupid eye and tries to tell her that Hermione should've ended up the Harry.

"Are you fucking kidding me? You're kidding me, right?" A laugh tumbles out of Jason's mouth, from the bottom of his throat, all crackly and raspy. Not hot at all.

She bites her lip as he rambles for five minutes straight about why Hermione should've been with Harry instead of Ron. Fuck, he's a nerd.

She's not saying she hates it or anything.

"-She didn't even _like_ Ron at first, why should they end up together?" She groans and rolls her chair around to finally face him. He's grinning and looking at her with the kind of look that makes it clear he's teasing her. For fun.

She hates him.

"That's why it's so good! Enemies to friends to lovers. The best kind of a slow burn." He chuckles again and she has to grip onto the edge of the desk till her knuckles are white. Judging by the look in his eyes before he leaves for the elevators, he might've noticed.

*

It's ten at night, and she's just finishing up her clockwork and emails to various employees when a frazzled Tim Drake runs past her desk to the door.

"Night, Tim." He startles and stops his running to turn around and scrutinize her with a judge mental look, as if he's in any position to be asking why she's still at her desk two hours before midnight.

"Marinette? Why are you still here?"

"I'm almost done, Timmy," He scrunches his nose at the nickname. "Don't worry about lil' old me." She grins wryly at him and waves so he'll get the hint and walk out the door.

He does, begrudgingly, after ten minutes of trying to convince her to get a ride home from him.

She puts her jacket on and wobbles out the front door, tired from simultaneously sitting on a comfy chair for more than ten hours and not being able to keep her eyes more than halfway open, except for the times she bickers talks to Jason.

It's been a few months, but she's felt like she's fit in since the start. The darkness of Gotham makes it seem real. More real than Paris has ever been to her. Paris was a web of lies tied with a pretty, red bow. Paris was not at all like the story books say.

She knows what to expect from Gotham, and Gotham gives it to her willingly, maybe with a few bruises and aches, but it's better than she's ever felt.

Marinette walks on the abandoned streets of Gotham, making sure to look behind her periodically to confirm no ones lingering behind her, waiting for a moment to attack.

"Paranoid, much?" She jumps a little, not expecting her assailant to be looking directly down at her from a low-standing roof. Apparently her five years as Ladybug doesn't prepare her for tall, muscular men in red helmets and shiny brown leather jackets stalking unsuspected women from rooftops.

"Apparently not enough." She says, when she gains the ability to speak again.

The anti-hero slips from the roof and leans against the wall of the building next to her.

"You should be more careful around these parts." The robotic humming lining his voice modulator cracks around the word 'careful' and she can almost hear what his regular voice sounds like. She rolls her eyes and keeps walking, the click clack of her low black heels practically the only sound around for miles.

She knows he follows.

"You don't have your soulmate to walk you home?" Comes the voice from almost above her. He's walking right next to her now, she can see his shiny leather jacket from the corner of her eye as she stalks down the sidewalk.

Huh. She knows that leather jacket.

"You seem familiar. Do I know you?" She smirks when he chokes and stops walking to sputter and cough up the saliva that went down his trachea.

"N-No. I've never seen you at all before, random citizen, have a nice night!" He takes off with a short puff of wind in his wake.

A shaky laugh and she stuffs her hands in the pockets of her coat and takes off to home.

The next day rolls slowly around, to much of her distaste. She can barely get out of bed without remembering the horrible night of her first death.

It's a vivid scene of splattering blood and knives and sharp katanas bursting out of a catastrophically sized robot, slitting and cutting edge people open over and over again.

She remembers every one, every single death the day of the first deadly akuma materialized on the street next to her parent's quaint and peaceful bakery.

Her death on that same day is a simple image of a long, sharp knife spearing into her stomach while she’s kneeling on the street and tearing out her own soul right in front of her eyes.

She screws her eyes shut and tries to take a deep breath. Work starts in twenty minutes and she's not exactly keen on letting people enter and exit unnoticed.

Marinette collapses onto her black leather chair ungracefully and rubs at her eyes, flipping open a compact mirror and examining the dark purple bags under them.

"You look like shit." She eyes the leather-covered elbows leaning into her desk and sighs, shutting the compact mirror.

"Thanks." She tries to sound nonchalant, but her voice is shaky and cracks at the end of the word. Jason rounds the circular shape of her desk and kneels down next to her shaking body.

"Are you okay?" His voice is deep and husky against her ear. She closes her eyes again in a futile attempt to block the tears that are threatening to pour out and nods.

His warm hand envelopes her shoulder and her wrist starts to burn violently.

"Fuck!" Her eyes unfurl from the sheer agony and dart to the red J on her wrist. Why the hell would it be burning? Is there some sort of guide to know your mark? Because Marinette would love to read it.

"Are you okay?" She jumps, forgetting Jason is there, and turns to glare at his shit-eating grin.

"Fuck off." She turns back to the computer and starts to type out the attendance for today, but he won't budge from his crouch, staring intently at her, and she can see the intense look from the corner of her eye.

She turns to him, he’s looking directly at her exposed arm, the solid black tally marks almost making it seem like a pattern, a cruel fucking pattern.

"That's an awful lot of lines, don't you think?" She grits her teeth and faces him fully to snap a retort, but sees his downcast expression.

She's surprised, to say the least. She's never seen Jason look so vulnerable before. He looks as if he’s about to start crying, fiddling with his thumbs like a six year old boy.

"It's something most of us go through once or... twice." She doesn't really know how to comfort people, but she supposes it works after he looks back up at her.

"What about you?" It's the hopefulness in his dilated pupils that make her choke.

That's... that’s not a whole lot of iris to be seen there.

"I've died more than a thousand times." She swallows, distracted and dazed by his fierce gaze, "I'd like to see that on my soulmate's arm." She laughs awkwardly and coughs.

"I-" he's cut off by the ringing of his phone and holds a finger up at her to wait for him. He leaves out the main door and doesn't come back for two hours.

Meanwhile, the Bats are handling a Scarecrow breakout, all hands on deck near Chinatown.

It's him. He's Red Hood.

She smiles. Less than a year in Gotham and she's already figured out his identity.

She guesses it was pretty obvious, since he never bothered to at least wear a different colored leather jacket or cover up the cracks in his voice modulator. Plus, he is a foot taller than her, something he's made clear in and out of the... costume.

She throws her purse on the blood-stained couch that had been in her apartment since before she moved in and chucks the high heels into her bedroom.

Only, she didn’t remember there being blood on her couch. She doesn’t remember the couch being able to groan.

Marinette whips her head to see Red Hood without a helmet leaning against her smelly couch and trying to stitch himself up with her sewing needle.

“Instead of staring at me, could you help, Pixie?” She grins and walks around the couch to kneel next to him and asses the damage.

It looks horrible. She’s surprised he can even talk around the blood coming out of his mouth and the big, gaping gash around his stomach, and she shudders, hard. She

Marinette quickly grabs the needle away from him and hurries to the bathroom to get the first-aid kit and promptly returns to his side, grabbing the medical needle and blotting the blood with a sterile pad.

It keeps coming. Marinette’s eyebrows furrow and she starts to stitch up the cut, but her hands keep shaking.

Goddamnit, why are they _shaking_?

Her eyes are too blurry with tears to see by now and she can’t properly stitch up the cut without accidentally pricking his skin, but she shakily stitches an inch.

“Marinette.” She whimpers at the blood coating up and down her arms, the concentration mostly on her hands and making it almost look black.

“Y-you should call your s-soulmate, man. It’s not l-lookin’ too good.” He’s barely able to shake his head at that from the overwhelming blood loss.

“Marinette.” Jason lifts up his arm an inch to rest it in her lap and squeeze her knee. A few tears roll down her cheeks at the realization.

He’s going to die in her apartment. Maybe his soulmate would bring him back to life, but she’s always going to remember her best friend bleeding out on the floor of her living room, barely able to make his limbs move.

She hangs her head and stops stitching. Her hands are shaking crazily by now, but she reaches down to squeeze his limp hand that’s almost devoid of color or a heartbeat.

He doesn’t squeeze back.

“Jason!” The tears dripping off of her face are mixing in with the thick blood on her hands, wiping away the red on her wrist.

There’s another tally on it. She can only gape in horror when she realizes what he’s been trying to tell her this whole time.

Marinette scrambles to uncover his own wrist and gasps at the pink M stamped on it, only noticing the hundreds of tally marks lining his arms and up his chest now that she isn’t focusing hard on the wound.

It’s her. He’s known this whole time. So she chooses to bring him back.

The J on her wrist burns with a newfound life, ironically, and he squeezes her shaking hand.

Marinette laughs and hits his arm. “You bastard, Jason. I hate you so much.” He laughs and removes his hand from her death-grip to cup her cheek and run his bloody thumb over the tear-stained skin.

“Marinette.” His voice is crackly and scratches at her very soul. The hand on her cheek moves to the back of her neck and yanks her down to meet his lips.

She leans in and rests her own hand to the back of his head, running her finger through the matted hair and scratching at his scalp.

Once she breaks from the kiss, she holds his hand and squeezes again, and he squeezes back.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are appreciated? If y’all got any questions I would be happy to answer em! I’m not going to tell you when he realizes, but it’s pretty early on.


End file.
